Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.

Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart.

On a good day I write, all day.

By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information.

There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under.

Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it.

I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.

If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.

Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.

Everything we do, I'd imagine, influences everything we will do.

Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?

He sniffed until the long hairs of his mustache had been sucked up into his nose and out of his leafy ears." — Bats 2015

It isn't you, ' he says, as though you're to be comforted by the irrelevant role you play in your own life.

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

Great leaders inspire us to go places we would never go on our own, and to attempt things we never thought we had in us.

The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character - that is the purpose of films and theatre.

I'm going to kill that god of yours, next. Then we'll see what you can do, and what you can't.

Retirement accords with the tone of my mind; I will not descend to a world I despise.

Why kill good people just to get a bad man?

As Buddy Rich, for instance, broke into the business at the age of three, I think it was, on drums, so indeed did I break into the business at the age of four as a singer.

I like the idea of quietly putting music out there and seeing what it does for itself, to let it take it's own life and see if people respond to it, simply because of what it is.